Europa Blues Read online

  Not that the voice actually said ‘peep’.

  Hultin’s mind drifted to black holes in the space–time continuum, to gravitational time dilation and other such things. Had he been transported to another, parallel universe while he was wallowing in that pool of mixed emotions? For forty years, his wristwatch – an expensive Patek Philippe – had never been more than a few seconds out. Suddenly it was fifteen minutes fast. And during a period of time which seemed like it had disappeared, at that. He shuddered and allowed his thoughts to drift on. It was common knowledge that time passed more slowly inside a gravitational field than outside of it. The weaker the gravitational force, the quicker the time. A clock on top of Mount Everest will always be quicker than a clock at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Einstein had long since demonstrated what happened to time at high speeds with his theory of relativity – not that a traffic jam snaking through Stockholm really moved that fast. But just imagine if the opposite was true. Imagine if those traffic jams were so unnaturally slow that they reduced the gravitational force for a moment and made time pass more quickly. Imagine it was God’s way of saying: ‘Now, my children, enough of the madness. You sit alone in your cars as they spew out the carbon dioxide that’s devastating this world. In addition to that, you’re barely budging an inch. I need to give you a sign, a sign that you should stop making fools of yourselves and carpool, at the very least. No fewer than three in a car, and you can use the bus lanes whenever you like.’ Thus spoke the Almighty to the Not-Quite-So Almighty, who now looked up and saw twelve more or less attentive eyes fixed on him. He looked at his watch. Thirty-three minutes past eight. The second hand was moving as normal.

  Jan-Olov Hultin froze. He realised he was faced with a choice. It was a parallel to his incontinence – he could have sunk down into it; he could have devoted the rest of his life to searching for explanations as to why he in particular had been struck by such an evil, mocking, relentlessly embarrassing condition. But he had realised he would never find any answers. He had realised it would lead to nothing more than an endless state of hopeless brooding which, in all likelihood, would result in either drug abuse or suicide. And so he had accepted the unfair hand fate had dealt him, put his incontinence pad in place and got on with his life.

  But now, though? Was that a real, mystical experience he had just had? A modern-day Meister Eckhart or Francis of Assisi? Or was it nothing more than his tired old watch going crazy?

  What had happened to time?

  He came to a decision. He would drop the watch off for repair. If it happened again, he would book himself in for a CT scan to check whether he was having a stroke.

  Because God’s voice had sounded remarkably like his own. At one point, years from now, he would experience the same sensation of complete disengagement with life. By then, he would have managed to retire no fewer than three times, but he would be back in charge of an investigation into an explosion on the Stockholm metro. Sitting in a room with both the A-Unit and the top brass from the Security Services, the same feeling of utter surreality would pass over him. As state secrets of the highest order were being discussed, he would once again experience that exact same sensation. But that was a long way off yet.

  He looked out at the A-Unit, cleared his throat, leafed through the pile of papers on the desk in front of him and said, in his most ordinary voice: ‘Right then, my friends: today’s business.’

  He stole a glance at them through his owl-like glasses, to see if anything had shown. They looked like they always did. Not a sign that any of them had noticed anything unusual. He breathed a sigh of relief and continued.

  ‘Yesterday, as you know, we had a couple of unusual events for the first time in a long while. None of you hesitated to use the forensic technicians and I’m sure the bill will be enough to turn Mörner’s stomach. But you did the right thing, of course. So this means we’ve got three ongoing cases, since Viggo and Gunnar are looking after the commuter train fight. Are we getting anywhere there, Gunnar?’

  Before he fixed his gaze on Gunnar Nyberg, his eyes passed over his watch. It was twenty-five to nine. Time seemed to be back to normal again.

  The sight of Gunnar Nyberg’s face was nearly as much of a surprise as it often had been lately. Though only nearly. By now, Hultin had – against all odds – started to get used to the idea of Sweden’s Biggest Policeman having abdicated the role. Nyberg’s 146 kilograms were more like 100 these days. He had done the impossible: he had lost weight. And since the former Mr Sweden rarely did anything by halves, he had really lost weight. Forty kilograms, something he put down to the whole dieting package: healthy food, jogging, swimming, and even acupuncture and reflexology. It was deeply impressive.

  Nyberg knew all too well that not a single member of the team had failed to see through his all-encompassing motive; they were even helping him along the way. So far, though, he hadn’t really had much luck.

  Gunnar Nyberg needed a woman.

  Some of his A-Unit colleagues had ‘set him up’ with ‘single women’ from their groups of acquaintances. He had been on a few ‘dates’ and was starting to get tired of all the Anglo-American expressions which seemed to go hand in hand with the opposite sex. Though he was far from tired of the opposite sex. On the contrary – a decades-long, self-imposed celibacy had come to an end; Gunnar Nyberg no longer felt the need to lash himself like a medieval monk. He had managed to repair his relationship with his children and even his ex-wife who, during the dark years of his bodybuilding period, he had mistreated in the worst way possible. These days, he regularly spent time with his grandson Benny, who was almost three now and would soon be getting a sibling – a sister, the ultrasound had mistakenly revealed.

  Unfortunately, he was forced to admit that the woman who had been granted the dubious honour of freeing him from his celibacy had almost entirely slipped his mind. It wasn’t enough that he couldn’t remember her name, he couldn’t even remember what she looked like. He had been so nervous that he had been climbing the walls of his old bachelor pad in Nacka. All he could remember was that Viggo Norlander had been behind it. She was a colleague of Norlander’s partner Astrid, a woman in her forties. They had planned to meet at his flat and then go out for a drink in Nacka Centrum. That much he remembered, but after that his memory failed him. He didn’t think they had even gone for that drink. All he had was a vague recollection of surprisingly immediate sexual activity. Nothing more, nothing less. The two had never met again, and the only lasting impression was something Viggo Norlander had said a few days later, with an ambiguous smile on his lips:

  ‘You sly dog.’

  He assumed Norlander had meant it as praise and not criticism, but Gunnar Nyberg had no idea. Just to be on the safe side, he never saw her again. He met other women instead, and as he became slimmer and slimmer, his confidence grew. By now, he felt nothing but excitement at the delights the opposite sex had to offer. He was ready for something more long-term.

  He cleared his throat and said: ‘You all know the details of the so-called commuter train fight. Night train from Kungsängen. Three pro graffiti artists completely renovated the carriage where a group of alcoholics were sitting. Five full-blown alcoholics in their forties – apparently they were morally outraged at the damage and set on the vandals, who were fit young twenty-somethings. It turned into a real fight. Two of the alcoholics were left brain-damaged, one of the vandals died; everyone was hurt in one way or another. When the train arrived in Karlberg, a pensioner with a little lapdog boarded a real bloodbath. It really is as boring as it sounds, from an investigative point of view. I hope these new cases are a bit more stimulating. Viggo and I don’t have anything else to add. Everyone involved has been taken into custody and charged. Aside from the pensioner, who had a heart attack. He’s out of danger now though, finally.’

  Hultin cast another glance at his watch. Everything seemed fine. He nodded and thanked Nyberg.

  ‘OK then,’ he said. ‘We can probably consider that
one closed. Time for ferocious little animals.’

  Jorge Chavez looked up from a pile of papers and cast a glance at Hjelm, who gestured for him to take charge.

  ‘OK,’ said Chavez. ‘Have any of you heard of the Gulo gulo?’

  Clearly none of them had.

  ‘It comes from the Latin for glutton. It’s another name for the wolverine. As I’m sure you can guess, it’s hinting at the animal’s insatiable greediness. They eat small animals during the summer, but in the winter they’d happily eat a reindeer or two. The night before last, four of the wolverines in Skansen were clearly feeling quite wintery, because these little creatures – which don’t weigh more than about thirty kilos each, by the way – guzzled down a man, virtually every last bit of him. We’ve got some fibres from a pale pink suit, a section of his leg, complete with a piece of eight-millimetre red-and-purple polypropylene rope, plus a right index finger and this.’

  He held up a dog-eared playing card.

  The queen of spades.

  ‘We found traces of the probable basis for their greediness. Cocaine. An analysis of the flesh and blood samples showed the same: that our victim had recently consumed a pretty large amount of cocaine. Since the drug was in his blood, it added to the wolverines’ insatiability.

  ‘Everyone knows that the worst things always happen – in war, for example – under the influence of drugs. Apparently the animal kingdom isn’t much different from the human race in that respect. Put simply: the cocaine drove the wolverines crazy, and from what we can tell, they even managed to work their way through almost his entire skeleton, his head included. We haven’t found it yet, at least. Despite that, my father-in-law’s men from the lab have managed to produce both a DNA analysis and a usable fingerprint. Neither of them match anything in the Swedish databases, so we’ve sent them on to Interpol and Europol.

  ‘We didn’t find our man’s fingerprints on the wooden fence around the enclosure either. None of the fingerprints from the fence match any entries in the database. His finger, which was pretty cut up, was full of earth that we’ve managed to link to the soil in the southern corner of the wolverine enclosure – the area right beneath the viewing platform. We also found both blood and skin fragments from the victim in that area – in five letters which, from what we can tell, he scratched in the ground with his finger. The word, if it even is one, is: “Epivu”. Capital E, the rest lower case. Does that mean anything to anyone?’

  It didn’t.

  ‘No,’ said Chavez. ‘It didn’t mean a thing to us either. Or the Internet. Not one single hit.’

  ‘Moving on from the wolverine enclosure,’ Paul Hjelm continued. ‘Because of the rope around his leg, we automatically assumed he’d been carried there, either unconscious or already dead. I took too long to react, if I’m honest. I’d just come from the Astrid Lindgren Children’s Hospital, where I’d been talking to a little girl who’d been shot just after 10 p.m. the night before. In Djurgården, not far from the eastern edge of Skansen. If we look at the path of the bullet and follow it back, you end up at the Skansen fence – parallel to the wolf enclosure. The lucky technicians had to expand their search to that enclosure too.

  ‘They eventually managed to find three things: firstly, our victim’s blood, high up on the fence – including on the barbed wire at the top and then also on the concrete wall beneath the viewing area on the other side. Secondly, they found a thick, broken neck chain, eighteen-carat gold, and finally, a 9mm Luger with a silencer. The magazine was empty. They did some sample shots. The gun’s a perfect match for the bullet taken from ten-year-old Lisa Altbratt’s upper arm. She’ll be absolutely fine, by the way.’

  ‘So in summary,’ Chavez took over. ‘Who is our man? He was wearing a pale pink suit and he had a thick gold chain around his neck; he snorts cocaine from the queen of spades and he’s armed with a silenced Luger. The print from his one remaining finger – the right index finger to be precise – is on all three of them: the card, the chain and the gun. It’s unambiguous. So who is he?’

  ‘Hit man?’ asked Nyberg.

  ‘Drug dealer?’ rejoined Norlander.

  ‘Porn star?’ Nyberg countered.

  ‘Pimp?’ Holm and Svenhagen blurted out in unison.

  The two women glanced at one another.

  ‘We’ll have to wait and see,’ Chavez said firmly. ‘At the very least, the whole thing screams underworld. He’s not in our databases, which means he’s probably foreign. If he was Swedish, the systems would’ve gone crazy with matches.’

  ‘So what happened to him?’ Hjelm continued. ‘Someone chased him through the Djurgården woods. He shot at them, but there’s no indication of him hitting anyone other than Lisa Altbratt. He made it to the fence and decided to climb up, even though there was a little path right alongside the fence. What does that tell us? Desperation, maybe? Blind panic? He ripped his fingers to shreds on the fence, didn’t care about grabbing the barbed wire – it cut deep into his hands – and then threw himself into the wolf enclosure. Luckily for him, they seem to have been well fed and content.’

  ‘One thing,’ Kerstin Holm said pensively. ‘Was there even anyone following him? Maybe it was just some kind of drug-induced psychosis? The only thing suggesting a crime is surely the rope around his leg. But maybe we should assume he had that there for some other reason. I don’t know, sexual maybe – some sort of bondage thing? He might have just been running from his own demons and fallen into the wolverines in blind panic?’

  There was silence. Chavez leafed through his papers.

  ‘The rope had been chewed off,’ he said quietly. ‘There’s no evidence it was tied around both legs, so it might have just been around one of them. Some kind of decoration. But,’ he added more loudly, ‘is that really likely?’

  ‘The key thing’s got to be whether there’s any sign of anyone else there,’ Holm continued. ‘It could be in a number of places, if I’ve followed everything you’ve been saying: outside Skansen, on the fence, in with the wolves, on the wall at the edge of the wolf enclosure, on the ground between the wolves and the wolverines, in with the wolverines. It doesn’t seem too likely we’d find anything in with the wolverines, but what about the other places? If his blood is all over the fence then why don’t we have anything from whoever was following him? Why didn’t they leave a single trace behind?’

  Chavez tore his papers.

  ‘Apparently there aren’t even any clear footprints from him. In the wolf enclosure, the ground’s practically all rock between the fence and the wall. There’s no trace of him on the asphalt – not on the fence around the wolverine enclosure, either.’

  ‘But in with the wolverines, surely his footprints have got to be there?’ said Holm. ‘I mean, he was writing in the earth with his fingers. It must be porous. Is there no sign of him there, by the letters?’

  Chavez nodded – the way a man who has missed something nods.

  ‘I know, Kerstin, but there aren’t any. There are wolverine prints, a general kind of chaos, traces of the actual ingestion … but no footprints. It rained that night, remember that.’

  ‘But not enough to get rid of the letters …’

  ‘He might’ve been thrown down once he was already tied up,’ said Hjelm. ‘If he was thrown in, maybe he got injured. All he managed to do was write that word which, for some reason, was more important than getting up. And then the wolverines appeared.’

  ‘And there’s no sign of anyone else having been there at all?’ Kerstin Holm persisted. ‘Not even on the fence?’

  ‘No,’ Chavez replied doggedly.

  ‘So let’s try to work out what happened with the wolves,’ said Hjelm. ‘Let’s imagine he got rid of the gun because he’d emptied the magazine. Not a smart move, but understandable. Blind fury. Then why did he tear his expensive chain off, that ridiculous extension of his penis, and throw it to the wolves?’

  ‘Maybe that’s just another sign of drug psychosis,’ Holm said. Hjelm thought he kne
w her well enough to realise she was now doing it just to annoy Jorge, who had a dark look in his eyes. It didn’t help that Hultin concluded:

  ‘So in other words, we don’t even know if a crime has been committed—’

  ‘Yes,’ Chavez said irritatedly. ‘This is a murder. If it isn’t, I’ll throw myself to the wolverines. That’s a promise.’

  The A-Unit stared at him. It was true that each of them had been hoping for a real case – for no more fights on commuter trains – but none more than Jorge Chavez. That much was obvious.

  ‘That’ll be a nice crowd-pleaser for the summer concerts in Skansen,’ Viggo Norlander said, blowing his nose. ‘Lasse Berghagen introducing the daring Wolverine Detective.’

  ‘Shut up,’ Chavez said.

  ‘Isn’t that my line?’ retorted Norlander.

  ‘Honestly,’ said Holm, ‘if we look at that incomprehensible writing and the fact that he wrote what he did instead of trying to get out … Doesn’t it all just suggest he was mad?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Hjelm. ‘I think he was mad. Drugged up and mad with panic. But I also think his panic was justified.’

  ‘But whoever was following him doesn’t seem to have climbed into the wolf enclosure after him,’ said Holm. ‘Is there any other way in?’

  Hjelm and Chavez exchanged glances. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

  ‘We’ll look into it,’ Hjelm said drily.

  Hultin pulled himself together, glanced at his watch and continued.

  ‘Well, that took a while. We’ve still got another event to go through. Kerstin?’

  Kerstin Holm looked slightly out of it. Her fingers touched the bare patch on her temple and she imagined she could feel her thoughts breaking up on the other side of the thin bone.

  ‘Could you start, Sara?’ she asked.

  Sara, who had been sitting quietly, looked up in surprise. She still thought of herself as Kerstin’s inferior and had been expecting – at most – a word or two. She took a sip of her cold coffee, pulled a face and composed herself.